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How to Use Deal Automation to Remove Friction From the Sales Process

The workflows tool makes it possible to automate almost anything in HubSpot. In fact, it can automate so many things that, if you've never used it before, you might find it a little overwhelming. But did you know that you can use workflows inside your deal pipeline without even opening the workflows tool? Below, you'll find four handy workflows that you can create from your deal settings. But first, you should define your deal pipeline.

Defining Your Deal Pipeline

Before you start adding automation to your sales process, you need to make sure your deal pipeline is rigorously defined. If you need help with that, check out this blog post for step-by-step instructions.

If you go to your DealSettings, you’ll see a section called Deal Pipelines and Stages.

You can edit the stages of a deal pipeline by clicking the Edit button beside it. That’ll bring you to a page where you can edit the stages.

Now that you've defined your deal pipeline, you can start automating.

4 Automated Actions to Save You Time

If you have access to workflows, click on the Automation tab near the top of the page. You’ll see your deal stages laid out in columns, and in each column, you can add actions that will be triggered automatically any time a deal moves into that stage.

Adding automation to your deal stages is a simple way to remove friction from your sales process. Here are four automated actions you can add to your deal stages to save your sales team a lot of work and make sure none of your prospects falls through the cracks:

Set property value

The Set property value action automatically updates specific properties whenever a deal moves into a specific stage. And the best part is that it’s not limited to deal properties. You can select a contact property and update that property for every contact associated with the deal that triggered the workflow. The same goes for companies.

One way to use this is with the Lead status property. Lead status is a default property inside HubSpot CRM that keeps track of the progress your salespeople are making with their leads. It comes with some default options, including New, Connected, Bad Timing, and Open Deal. You can also customize the options to make them more relevant to your sales motion.

Regardless of what options you use, it’s a best practice to use Lead status to keep track of prospects before they enter your deal pipeline and then use deals to track their progress once there’s a potential sale on the table. For a lot of sales teams, this means extra work every time a deal gets created because the salesperson has to go through and update each contact’s Lead status to Open Deal. And if they skip that step, they risk accidentally nurturing leads who are already actively progressing toward buying.

That’s a great place to use a little automation.

So on that deal stage Automation page, go to the first stage in your deal pipeline and add an action for Set property value.

Lead status exists on both contact and company records. Depending on how your sales process works, you might want to update one or the other or both.

For this example, we’ll update the Contact property, so select Contact as the property type. Then, go down to the bottom of the sidebar and select Lead status from the property list. And finally, search for the appropriate Lead status and select it. When you’re done, click Save. Now, any time a deal gets put in this first deal stage, the Lead status for any contacts associated with that deal will get updated to Open Deal.

That’s one less step your salespeople will have to take when they create a deal, and it will ensure your contacts have the most up-to-date Lead status.

Create task and rotate deal to owner

The Create task action creates a task and assigns it either to the deal’s owner or to a specific HubSpot user. Throughout your sales process, there will be times when the sales rep who owns the deal will need to be reminded to take certain actions, and there will also be times when the help of other team members will be required.

For example, let’s imagine that there’s a stage in your sales process when the sales rep needs to demonstrate your product and that he typically gets help from a sales engineer during the meeting. You could have one of the stages leading up to that meeting trigger a task that gets assigned to the sales engineer to let her know she needs to get ready.

To do that, go to the appropriate deal stage and add an action for Create task.

In the task description, you can pull information from any deal property to give the sales engineer as much information as possible. Then, you can select the sales engineer as the person the task gets assigned to.

You might be wondering what you should do if you have more than one sales engineer. Great question! Notice that if you set up the action to assign the task to the deal's owner, you’re given the option to select which owner:

This is because you can add custom owner properties to records inside of HubSpot. So for your deals, you could create a Sales engineer property, and then you’d be able to have the task assigned to that engineer.

You might be wondering how that sales engineer gets assigned in the first place. Another great question! When the deal moves into the stage where a sales engineer gets assigned, you can use the Rotate deal to owner action to assign a sales engineer.

So if you’ve created a custom Sales engineer owner property, you can use this action to have the deal automatically assigned to a sales engineer. You can select individual sales engineers for it to be rotated among, or, if you have your sales engineers organized into a team inside HubSpot, you can select that team, and the deals will be divvied out to the members of that team.

You can have the owner rotation and the task assignment happen in the same deal stage, but if you do that, make sure the owner rotation happens first and the task assignment happens second. That way, you can rest assured that there will be a sales engineer for the task to be assigned to.

Create ticket

If you’re in a services industry, chances are you’ll need to assign an account owner to the deal to handle implementation after the sale closes. This might happen when the deal moves into the Closed-Won deal stage, but kudos to your team if it happens sooner than that. Offering a seamless handoff between sales and services is hard to do, and it’s a place where many companies unwittingly cause a lot of pain and confusion for their new customers.

Regardless of when you choose to bring in your services team, there are a couple of actions you’re going to want to take. First, you’ll want to have another owner rotation to assign the deal to a services rep. After that, you’ll want to create a ticket.

Tickets are used inside HubSpot CRM to keep track of customer needs. Tickets are similar to deals in that they move through stages, but instead of working toward a sale, tickets move toward a resolution. In this example, you might have a ticket pipeline to track how a new customer’s implementation process is going. And you could automatically have a ticket created and assigned when a deal moves to a particular stage.

To do that, you’re going to want to add an automated action to that deal stage for Create ticket.

You can add details to the ticket that are pulled from deal properties. In fact, you can have values from deal properties copied directly into ticket properties. So if there’s specific information your services team members need to know before they can get a new customer up and running, you should have your sales team collect that information and store it on the deal record. Then, everything will transfer over, and your customers will get a much more seamless transition from sales to services than they normally would.

Send internal email notification

There are all kinds of automated actions you can tie to your deal stages, but the last one I'll mention is internal email notifications. With this action, any time a deal moves into a particular stage, an email will be sent to specific HubSpot users.

One common use for this is sending an email to the team whenever a deal closes. This is a great opportunity for salespeople to celebrate one another’s successes and for leadership to have more visibility into what’s happening.

To set this up, go to your Closed-Won deal stage and add an action for Send internal email notification.

Then, just as with any email, you need to choose who the email will be sent to, what its subject line will be, and what its body will include. You can have the email sent to specific individuals or to entire teams, and the subject line and body can include information from deal properties. For example, there’s a standard deal property called Closed won reason that’s required whenever a deal is moved into the Closed-Won stage. You could include that information in the email that's sent out.

And that’s your quick tour of deal automation. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

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